Residents and members of the city's Ten Point Coalition gathered in Tarkington Park on Sunday to celebrate a bittersweet milestone: two years without a homicide.

During an eight-week period in 2015, an area of the Butler-Tarkington neighborhood measuring less than 0.15 square miles saw four homicides. The neighborhood, southwest of Broad Ripple, includes Butler University's campus.

"Families, residents were scared," said former neighborhood association president Ted Feeney on Sunday. "It was a really terrible scene ... a lot of fear."

People started asking what they could do, he said, and so the nightly faith patrols began. Through the Ten Point Coalition, a group of around 25 volunteers has walked the streets most Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday — and sometimes Sunday —nights since then.

The organization, which has expanded to seven other Indiana cities, specifically recruits ex-criminals and current neighborhood residents for the patrols. Volunteers explained Sunday this ensures that out on the streets, they are walking up to people they know, making it easier to talk about choices and offer help out of the "underground economy."

"It's about getting people together," said Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Chief Bryan Roach. "It's an understanding that it's not just a police problem or a prosecutor problem, it's a community issue and that all of us together can address it."

The coalition also reported Crown Hill and the Highland Vicinity neighborhoods have gone one year without a homicide.

But criminal homicides have continued to surge across Indianapolis. By Oct. 1, Indianapolis police reported 102 criminal homicides in 2017, compared to 117 the same time last year. On Saturday evening, kids playing hide-and-seek in a west-side park discovered a body.

Feeney said he hoped the successful Butler-Tarkington model will spread to other neighborhoods. Roach defined the model as " a community standing up and saying 'This isn't going to happen anymore.'"

"It's not always police who can get out and reach people," he said.

Each of the city's six districts have started developing a council to come up with their own plan for reducing crime, Roach said.

The Rev. Charles Harrison, Ten Point Coalition board president, said in 2018 the coalition will expand its efforts into three new, high-crime neighborhoods: around 42nd Street and Post Road, 10th and Rural Streets and in Haughville.

As for Butler-Tarkington, residents said their efforts will continue. Gregory Wilson Sr. said he's watched a lot of young men in the neighborhood die since he became a resident in 1985, including his son, Gregory Wilson Jr., in 2015.